InterWest News
Show Me the Money:
Flip Gianos of Interwest Partners Speaks
May 17, 2007 — By Cathy Brooks, Guidewire Connection
As in life, business is marked by cycles - the birth to death of a business, the upward and downward flow of markets, the expansion and contraction of opportunity.
When it comes to venture capital things are no different, except perhaps to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Venture capital as a serious business isn't all that old in the big picture of things. While its history dates back to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, venture capital as we know it began its serious growth after World War II.
But this isn't a history lesson.
(Though if you want to get a nice 30,000-foot view of how the VC market has evolved, you can read this).
Instead, in this conversation with Flip Gianos of Interwest Partners, we talk about how the changes in the market have brought us back to some basics - especially where entrepreneurs are concerned.
Flip's perspective is a clear one, having spent the better part of the last couple decades investing in an array of technology ventures - largely focused in IT, semiconductors, networking and applications software.
If that sounds like a broad brushstroke of technologies that's because it is - but several things permeate Flip's theme on investing - regardless of technology or market sector. In this podcast, we tackle one such perspective, which is the need for today's entrepreneurs to create companies that stand alone as independent ventures rather than exist purely as feature-sets that need other companies (or acquisition) to survive.